Much of the problem is that in a lot of contemporary stories, i.e. films and TV, the actual vital element of the quest is often hidden. In Back to the Future the quest is for Marty McFly to go… well… back to the future. He’s trapped in the past and must find a way to return home. But that’s not really the story. The story is that his ordinary world has fallen into stagnation because his father couldn’t stand up for himself, because the whole family lets life happen to them, rather than they happening to life. And Marty must journey over the threshold into a magical kingdom, a pastel-and-bubblegum 1950s, and penetrate to the heart of the cancer, and rejuvenate his teenage father, and his world.
So many of our stories are like this, hiding the true meaning in subplot, or beneath layers of imagery, and you can only fully see and understand the tropes like meeting the goddess and apotheosis by peeling back these layers.
It can also be tricky because mainstream cinema, with its three-act structure, tends to deform and contort Campbell’s perfect circle somewhat, to provide the most satisfying emotional payoff for the audience. The first act is usually the time to establish the protagonist and their ordinary world. Show them bored at work, bullied at school, trapped in routine, in an unhappy marriage, whatever is the status quo. Then comes the call to adventure, and the act ends with the crossing of the threshold. So a quarter of the journey, in a third of the film.
The second act is usually the road of trials, meeting a gang of plucky sidekicks who will help them out and villains who will try to thwart their progress. A snappy training montage.
Then the stuff at the bottom of Campbell’s circle, everything I was discussing yesterday, gets drawn out across the end of act two and much of act three. Take The Matrix. Neo meets a sort of goddess in the Oracle, roughly halfway through the film. But the truth she imparts actually takes Neo a lot of screen time to fully process and assimilate. He goes on a final trial - to rescue Morpheus - and then must face the father/power-centre in Agent Smith, and even touch defeat and death, before he reaches apotheosis, a rebirth into godhood. Then the final quarter of Campbell’s circle (which I’m going to break down in a post soon) is squashed into the very last moments of the film.
I guess the circle is the archetype, it’s every element progressing to the next with minimum effort. You’d perhaps have a dull story if you timed it out too precisely. By stretching that emotional core down at the bottom of the circle out across much of the latter half of the film, you build to a crescendo that delivers a powerful climax, floods the audience’s brains with chemicals of release, then a rapid comedown of denouement leading out to the end titles and the lights come up and the audience leaves still aglow in that post-coital wash of happy and exhausted emptiness.
OK I’ve got to go soon, I’m off for the rest of the day and all of tomorrow to help my friend with some manual labouring work - but let me just have some more of a think about The Matrix before I go…
So the Oracle is the goddess, she represents the vital energy of the Matrix’s cosmos. What Neo learns from her is that he isn’t the One, that he’s not special, that he’s close but no cigar. But really, I think, what he learns is that prophecies are bullshit. He learns that there’s no external force separate from himself that is going to imbue him with power and turn him into a hero. There’s no magic sword for him to lift that will transform him into a hero.
But he decides he’s going to go rescue Morpheus anyway. Screw all this noise. He doesn’t need a prophecy - he doesn’t need what is in fact yet more structure foisted upon him from the outside. If he wants to face what is too terrifying to face, if he wants to go on the true journey into the centre of the dark fortress (although at this stage he’s still only going in to get his friend and get back out) then he’ll damn well do it by himself.
This is a vital moment of self-discovery. That it is our own individual will that drives us. That you can feel like your ship is buffeted on the winds - either through a robot simulation that controls your very perception of reality, or a prophecy that forces you into the framework of a hero - or you can stand at the wheel sailing that ship. This is the second most important discovery Neo makes, and it is accompanied in the film by a great visualisation of him coming into this power. Guns. Trenchcoats. A hotel lobby that gets utterly, insanely, decimated.
But then what’s the most important discovery? It’s after Neo plucks Morpheus from the clutches of the evil that cannot be faced, gets him to safety, and then, instead of running, turns back around. The evil that cannot be faced will destroy anyone who is not ready, but Neo is ready. Agent Smith stands before him. Neo crouches into his fighting stance, crooks his finger, beckons. Bring it.
The embodiment of every dark aspect of the subconscious, everything that we fly from, and the hero who has become master of his own destiny: these two stand and spar. The flurries come too fast for us mere mortals to track. Any of us would be torn apart. But the hero remains, matches blow for blow, drives the darkness back.
He earns a respite, and now is the time to flee. These are the voices of his allies, the mere mortals, the last remnants of his ego, telling him to run. He does so, and it looks like he will escape, and then he turns a corner and there the evil stands, waiting, and pierces him through the heart.
Because here is the final and most important discovery. The hero who finds their own agency, who begins sailing their own ship, what they discover in the heart of the deepest darkness, the truth that most cannot stand to look upon, is that the ship and the ocean upon which it sails are one and the same. The hero is the darkness, and the darkness is the hero. Self is Other, and Other is Self.
Neo cannot die to Agent Smith and the forces of eternity, because Neo has realised that he himself is those forces of eternity.
He rises, the doors of perception cleansed, seeing reality as it truly is, in all its splendour (and late-90s computer graphics). He doesn’t even have to duel with Agent Smith any more, there is no fight, the thing that cannot be faced is nothing, is chaff to the wind. Forms rise and fall. All individuals die, but only as waves on a sea that is eternal. Neo is the waves, but Neo is also the sea. Death and life, these are but mutually-arising concepts signifying something greater and beyond their two extremes. Neo has touched the realm of this beyond, touched and become it. He is ascended.
So many of our stories are like this, hiding the true meaning in subplot, or beneath layers of imagery, and you can only fully see and understand the tropes like meeting the goddess and apotheosis by peeling back these layers.
It can also be tricky because mainstream cinema, with its three-act structure, tends to deform and contort Campbell’s perfect circle somewhat, to provide the most satisfying emotional payoff for the audience. The first act is usually the time to establish the protagonist and their ordinary world. Show them bored at work, bullied at school, trapped in routine, in an unhappy marriage, whatever is the status quo. Then comes the call to adventure, and the act ends with the crossing of the threshold. So a quarter of the journey, in a third of the film.
The second act is usually the road of trials, meeting a gang of plucky sidekicks who will help them out and villains who will try to thwart their progress. A snappy training montage.
Then the stuff at the bottom of Campbell’s circle, everything I was discussing yesterday, gets drawn out across the end of act two and much of act three. Take The Matrix. Neo meets a sort of goddess in the Oracle, roughly halfway through the film. But the truth she imparts actually takes Neo a lot of screen time to fully process and assimilate. He goes on a final trial - to rescue Morpheus - and then must face the father/power-centre in Agent Smith, and even touch defeat and death, before he reaches apotheosis, a rebirth into godhood. Then the final quarter of Campbell’s circle (which I’m going to break down in a post soon) is squashed into the very last moments of the film.
I guess the circle is the archetype, it’s every element progressing to the next with minimum effort. You’d perhaps have a dull story if you timed it out too precisely. By stretching that emotional core down at the bottom of the circle out across much of the latter half of the film, you build to a crescendo that delivers a powerful climax, floods the audience’s brains with chemicals of release, then a rapid comedown of denouement leading out to the end titles and the lights come up and the audience leaves still aglow in that post-coital wash of happy and exhausted emptiness.
OK I’ve got to go soon, I’m off for the rest of the day and all of tomorrow to help my friend with some manual labouring work - but let me just have some more of a think about The Matrix before I go…
So the Oracle is the goddess, she represents the vital energy of the Matrix’s cosmos. What Neo learns from her is that he isn’t the One, that he’s not special, that he’s close but no cigar. But really, I think, what he learns is that prophecies are bullshit. He learns that there’s no external force separate from himself that is going to imbue him with power and turn him into a hero. There’s no magic sword for him to lift that will transform him into a hero.
But he decides he’s going to go rescue Morpheus anyway. Screw all this noise. He doesn’t need a prophecy - he doesn’t need what is in fact yet more structure foisted upon him from the outside. If he wants to face what is too terrifying to face, if he wants to go on the true journey into the centre of the dark fortress (although at this stage he’s still only going in to get his friend and get back out) then he’ll damn well do it by himself.
This is a vital moment of self-discovery. That it is our own individual will that drives us. That you can feel like your ship is buffeted on the winds - either through a robot simulation that controls your very perception of reality, or a prophecy that forces you into the framework of a hero - or you can stand at the wheel sailing that ship. This is the second most important discovery Neo makes, and it is accompanied in the film by a great visualisation of him coming into this power. Guns. Trenchcoats. A hotel lobby that gets utterly, insanely, decimated.
But then what’s the most important discovery? It’s after Neo plucks Morpheus from the clutches of the evil that cannot be faced, gets him to safety, and then, instead of running, turns back around. The evil that cannot be faced will destroy anyone who is not ready, but Neo is ready. Agent Smith stands before him. Neo crouches into his fighting stance, crooks his finger, beckons. Bring it.
The embodiment of every dark aspect of the subconscious, everything that we fly from, and the hero who has become master of his own destiny: these two stand and spar. The flurries come too fast for us mere mortals to track. Any of us would be torn apart. But the hero remains, matches blow for blow, drives the darkness back.
He earns a respite, and now is the time to flee. These are the voices of his allies, the mere mortals, the last remnants of his ego, telling him to run. He does so, and it looks like he will escape, and then he turns a corner and there the evil stands, waiting, and pierces him through the heart.
Because here is the final and most important discovery. The hero who finds their own agency, who begins sailing their own ship, what they discover in the heart of the deepest darkness, the truth that most cannot stand to look upon, is that the ship and the ocean upon which it sails are one and the same. The hero is the darkness, and the darkness is the hero. Self is Other, and Other is Self.
Neo cannot die to Agent Smith and the forces of eternity, because Neo has realised that he himself is those forces of eternity.
He rises, the doors of perception cleansed, seeing reality as it truly is, in all its splendour (and late-90s computer graphics). He doesn’t even have to duel with Agent Smith any more, there is no fight, the thing that cannot be faced is nothing, is chaff to the wind. Forms rise and fall. All individuals die, but only as waves on a sea that is eternal. Neo is the waves, but Neo is also the sea. Death and life, these are but mutually-arising concepts signifying something greater and beyond their two extremes. Neo has touched the realm of this beyond, touched and become it. He is ascended.
Right. And on that note I'm gonna post this bad boy up, and go ascend to the role of lifter of heavy objects. See ya!
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